A research group led by Professor Cheng Jian at Tsinghua University has 3D-printed a solid, millimetre-scale object in 0.6 seconds, turning what normally takes minutes or hours into something faster than a human heartbeat. Their technique, published in Nature in April 2026, does not build objects layer by layer. Instead, it floods a vat of liquid resin with precisely shaped light from every angle at once, solidifying the entire form in a single sub-second burst.
The method is called DISH, short for Digital Incoherent Synthesis of Holographic Light Fields. It represents the fastest volumetric 3D printing ever reported in a peer-reviewed journal, and it achieves a printing resolution of roughly 19 micrometres across a 1-centimetre build volume. To put that resolution in perspective, it is finer than the width of a typical human hair (about 70 micrometres), meaning the printer can distinguish and reproduce surface details at an exceptionally small scale.
How DISH actually works
Conventional holographic 3D printing relies on coherent laser light, which produces sharp interference patterns but also generates speckle noise, the grainy distortion familiar to anyone who has pointed a laser at a wall. DISH sidesteps that problem by using spatially incoherent light sources instead. The key piece of hardware is a periscope-based rotating illuminator, a spinning optical assembly that delivers light from rapidly shifting angles into a vat of photopolymer resin.
Each angular snapshot contributes a partial holographic pattern. As the illuminator cycles through its positions, those partial patterns stack up inside the resin to form a complete three-dimensional intensity map. When the accumulated light dose crosses the resin’s curing threshold, the target shape solidifies all at once. There is no print head tracing a path, no platform rising out of a pool. The object simply appears, fully formed, inside the liquid.
The research team, based in Tsinghua’s Department of Automation, reported these results with experimentally measured values: 0.6 seconds of print time, approximately 19 micrometres of spatial resolution, and a 1-centimetre printing range. Those numbers were subjected to Nature’s peer-review process before publication.
Why the speed matters
To appreciate what DISH achieves, it helps to know where volumetric printing stood before it. The most prominent prior work came from groups at UC Berkeley and EPFL in Switzerland, which developed tomographic volumetric additive manufacturing (VAM). Those systems could print small objects in roughly 30 to 120 seconds with resolutions around 50 to 80 micrometres. DISH is roughly 50 to 200 times faster and achieves resolution about three to four times finer.
Speed at this scale is not just a convenience. In fields like microfluidics, dental prosthetics, and micro-optics, the ability to produce intricate parts in under a second could eventually enable high-throughput manufacturing that today’s layer-by-layer printers cannot match. A production line that prints one part per second operates in a fundamentally different category than one that prints one part per minute.
The 19-micrometre resolution also opens doors. At that level of detail, DISH can reproduce surface textures and internal geometries that most consumer and many industrial 3D printers cannot achieve, even when given far more time. For applications requiring precision at the scale of biological cells or optical components, that resolution is significant.
Hayden Taylor, a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley whose own lab has published extensively on tomographic volumetric printing, has described the general challenge facing all volumetric methods: balancing speed, resolution, and build volume simultaneously. DISH’s reported numbers suggest a significant advance on all three fronts, though Taylor and other researchers in the field have noted that independent replication and material testing will be essential before drawing conclusions about practical viability.
What the research does not yet answer
Printing speed and resolution are necessary but not sufficient for real-world manufacturing. Several critical questions remain open.
Mechanical durability: The Nature paper does not include published stress-test data or material-property comparisons against parts made with slower methods. A solid object that forms in 0.6 seconds still needs to withstand bending, heat, and chemical exposure. Whether the rapid curing process produces internal stresses or incomplete polymerization that could weaken parts over time is unknown from the current published record.
Scale: The demonstrated build volume is 1 centimetre. Industrial additive manufacturing routinely handles parts tens of centimetres across or larger. Scaling holographic systems introduces phase errors and optical distortions that grow with volume, and resin absorption limits how deeply light can penetrate. Whether DISH’s periscope illuminator can maintain its performance at larger scales has not been addressed.
Cost and replicability: Detailed engineering specifications, component costs, and power requirements for the rotating illuminator have not appeared in publicly accessible documents. Without that information, independent labs face a steeper path to replication, and manufacturers cannot estimate what a production-grade DISH system would cost compared to existing stereolithography or digital light processing machines.
Material range: The published work used photopolymer resin, the standard medium for light-based 3D printing. Whether DISH can work with filled resins, ceramic slurries, or biocompatible materials, categories that would dramatically expand its usefulness, remains untested in the public literature.
Where DISH sits in the broader race
Volumetric 3D printing has been gaining momentum as an alternative to layer-by-layer methods since around 2019, when the Berkeley and EPFL teams published their tomographic approaches. The appeal is straightforward: eliminating layers eliminates layer lines, support structures, and the mechanical limitations that come with building an object one slice at a time. But volumetric methods have been constrained by slow speeds, limited resolution, or both.
DISH pushes past those constraints more aggressively than any previously published system. Its combination of sub-second speed and sub-20-micrometre resolution is, as of its April 2026 publication, unmatched in the peer-reviewed literature. That does not mean it is ready for deployment. It means the theoretical ceiling for volumetric printing has been raised substantially, and the engineering community now has a new target to aim for.
What independent replication and scaling tests will reveal next
The practical next step for anyone tracking this technology is to watch the citation trail around the Nature paper. Independent groups attempting to replicate DISH, extend it to new materials, or scale it to larger volumes will generate the follow-on evidence needed to judge whether this proof of concept can become a production tool. Until that work appears, DISH stands as a genuine breakthrough in speed and precision, but one still confined to a centimetre-scale lab demonstration with unanswered questions about durability, cost, and scale.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
